As most of you have probably read already, Google is launching a program that will allow newsmakers to comment on articles in which that person is featured or involved. Google staffers (or interns) will make e-mail and phone calls to verify the identity of the commenter and post the person’s comments online. “These are very good, time-honored means for confirming identity but no method is foolproof,“ according to the Google News help site.
(Read more about the program on Editor & Publisher or from Google).
“Google works with each author to confirm their identity individually. The means for confirming identity may differ on a case by case basis, but they may include contacting the organization affiliated with the author, contacting local officials, or collaborating with journalists.”
A lot of bloggers have asked why the newspaper industry isn’t doing this. Well, the industry is -- in a way.
A ton of newspapers have online comments enabled on stories, and just about all of them accept letters to the editor over e-mail. That written, there’s a big difference with Google’s system: The “involved parties’” opinion will be shown with the original article as if it’s an article comment, only the writer’s identity will actually be verified through traditional journalistic methods. (Most newspapers don’t verify the comments on articles, but do verify the letters that appear in the opinion or editorial section – this is a new intersection of those things.) Also, there presumably won’t be an editorial page editor deciding which comments to accept or reject for print or online.
Could newspapers have done this? Well, yes – to a point. At least to start, those who comment on stories on Google News will probably be nationally prominent figures. Often, stories that feature such people come from the Associated Press (or Reuters, or Bloomberg and therefore appear in dozens of newspapers) and there is no industry-wide, centralized, newspaper.com “verified commenting” system in place. Maybe there should be – but that would open a can of worms that we’ll leave closed for now.
With stories about local (town, county, statewide) elections, crime events, etc., newspapers could set up a similar system pretty easily. Reporters could monitor the comments on stories they write (they should be doing this anyway) and make a few calls to verify the identity of certain commenters, then highlight those with a “verified comment” tag or through a color-coding system. Maybe a mid- or smaller-market newspaper should start doing this and see what happens.
I’m highlighting here a few reactions to the Google system from the blogosphere:
Reactions
Center for Citizen Media (Dan Gillmor): “The fact that Google is trying this is, in one sense, testament to an abject failure on the part of traditional news operations. With the Net, they could have given people the chance to comment in this way — above and beyond the standard comment published as part of a story or a letter to the editor. They didn’t, and left this opening.”
Read/Write Web (Josh Catone): “While it is certainly important for news organizations to offer dissenting views, this feels like an odd choice for Google for a couple of reasons. First, this is a very "web 1.0" feature. Rather than encouraging an open discussion on news topics, Google is perpetuating a closed debate between newsmakers and journalists. And they're using a clunky, slow medium (email) to do it.
TechCrunch (Michael Arrington): “Whatever the rules, this is going to require a ton of manual labor on Google’s end. This stuff simply can’t be automated. Google is going to have to see a very, very large increase in page views to justify the expense…. And all just to exclude the opinions of non-participants? That doesn’t make any sense to me. I certainly value the comments of participants in our blog posts. But equally valuable are the insights of third party experts who know more about given subject areas than we do.”